Our Histroy (Lambadi Loog's Histroy)

BANJARAS, THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN OF INDIA: History unearthed.

The
origin of Banjara community is stated in the area between Bikaner and
Bahawalpur, Pakistan. After the fall of the Rajputs, they started
spreading across the country. The Banjara had spread to Andhra Pradesh,
Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and other states of
India. About half their number speak Lambadi, one of the Rajasthani
dialects, while others are native speakers of Hindi, Telugu and other
languages dominant in their respective areas of settlement. Rathod,
Parmar, Pawar, Chauhan,and Jadhav castes belong to Banjara community in
Rajasthan and Gujarat now are in General Seats after the communal rights
taken place in Rajasthan for Reservation in 2008 as they were landlords
in Amarkot, Fathaykot and Sialkot before Partition of India and
Pakistan. They are an ST in Andhra Pradesh (where they are listed as
Sugali), Orissa, Karnataka (SC), Haryana, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh.
Even though, they settled across the country, they still consider
themselves as nomad community.

Class and Caste Differences Among the Lambadas in Andhra Pradesh

The
Banjara Seva Sangh estimates that there are some 5 million Banjaras in
India, who are divided into 17 sub-groups in different states and are
known by at least 27 different names.

All of them have a
common culture and a common language. The Lambada dialect is
predominantly a mixture of Sanskrit, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati and
Hindi and bears the influence of the local language.

They
live in small settlements, each referred to as a Thanda. One
peculiarity about this tribe is that unlike all other tribes which are
located only in some districts or some states, the Banjaras can be found
in nearly all the states of India.

The Banjaras are
treated as scheduled tribes in some states, scheduled castes in certain
other states, denotified tribes in some states, and some sections of the
Lambadas are even considered as belonging socially and economically
forward classes in some states.

For instance, in Andhra
Pradesh, Lambadas in the Telangana region were only recently recognised
as Schduled Tribes; earlier they were recognised as Denotified Tribes.

Lambadas
are of North-west Indian origin, who lived primarily by their earnings
from transportation on the pack bullocks. There is evidence to show that
they supplied food grains etc. to the Moghuls when they invaded the
Deccan. However, there is some dispute about the nature of their Moghul
connection. Whether they accompanied the Moghuls as an ordinance corps
in the conquest of the Deccan, and some of them later stayed back to
continue trade, or whether they were already present as traders, having
come in an earlier period, and assisted the Moghuls when the latter came
South.

The tribe, forced by the compulsions of trade,
was continuously on the move, and this probably helped to preserve its
only form of wealth, cattle, from localised droughts, which are quite
common even to this day. However, in the absence of concrete historical
evidence the reasoning could be reversed to state that the Lambadas, to
protect their cattle from drought moved in search of feed and
subsequently took to trade which was initially a subsidiary means of
livelihood. The development of cheap modern means of road and rail
destroyed their occupation.